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When Martyn Stewart was 11 years old, he spent countless hours in the woods near his family’s home in Birmingham, England. It was the mid 1960s, and out there in the untouched forest he was captivated by the sounds of nature: the wind, the animals, the water in the streams.
It was around this time that he acquired a recording device and brought it outside. “The first recording I ever made that I kept was the Eurasian Blackbird,” Stewart says today. “He became my mate. He was the guy who taught me melodies.” 

Decades later, Stewart’s collection of nature sounds includes 97,000 individual recordings making up 30,000 hours. (That’s roughly 3.5 years.) The library includes the sounds of more than 3,500 bird species, countless insects, and myriad frogs, toads, mammals, trees, deserts, oceans and more, with Stewart capturing these field recordings in more than 60 countries.  

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Now, a select few of them are folded into Imperfect Cadence, a collaborative album by Stewart and Robert Shields, a Scottish singer, songwriter and producer who makes music under the moniker ONR. On the album, Shields sings and plays instruments that complement and fuse with sounds Stewart recorded in Scotland during the mid-1970s, a time he spent traveling across the country — often on foot — recording the symphony of its vast, untouched and famously stunning wilderness.  

It was “a sanctuary where I could go and lose myself, basically,” Stewart says. “Anywhere you dropped a microphone, you got a fantastic recording.” (Years later, when he was in his late 20s, Stewart learned that his biological father was Scottish, which he believes accounts for his affinity for the country.) 

Martyn Shields in the 1970s

Courtesy of Martyn Stewart

Shields got involved in the project through Steven Melrose, the global head of creative at Los Angeles-based publishing company Seeker Music, who is also Scottish. Melrose was working with ONR when he was approached by Stewart’s niece, Amanda, who was hoping to mesh her uncle’s recordings with music in a respectful and contemporary way. Melrose introduced Shields and Stewart, and it was decided — given everyone’s connection to Scotland — the project would focus there.  

Shields and Stewart subsequently met on Zoom to chat about making something together. Shields found himself entranced by Stewart’s life story and work. “The real kicker was when he then sent me the audio, which is just unbelievable,” Shields says. 

Recordings include those Stewart made in areas around the famously picturesque Rannoch Moor, Culloden Moor, the site of a famous 1746 battle, and while walking along Hadrian’s Wall, an ancient Roman stone fortification dating back to 122 AD. “You kind of get into that mood of desolation and isolation,” Stewart says of being in these locations, even just through the audio. “You almost feel your primal self again. You can feel the blood pulsing through your veins.” 

“The last thing I wanted to do was to take the audio and to mutilate it,” says Shields. “It was so beautiful in its raw form that I knew I had to treat it as a collaborator and not as a canvas.” Both artists were conscious of not wanting make “spa music, or something a little bit trite,” Shields adds.   

Rannoch Moor, Scotland

Courtesy of Martyn Stewart

Imperfect Cadence is far from it. From the bird calls playing in tandem with Shield’s rich voice on the stirring opener “You & I” to the gentle waves on the orchestral “Than Water,” the project is a sophisticated and moving balance of input from both artists. “It was a genuine collaboration with the sort of oddity that Martyn wasn’t contributing musically,” says Shields. “He was contributing to the overall atmosphere and theme.” 

Imperfect Cadence was released Dec. 5 on Seeker Music, with the company’s Melrose saying that given the album’s beauty, power and emotional depth he “couldn’t be prouder to be part of it alongside Martyn and Robert. Nature loves us unconditionally — we would do well to show it more love in return.” 

Nature has indeed taken a hard hit in the decades since Stewart began recording it. Imperfect Cadence presents moments from the natural world that in many cases no longer exist due to subsequent human development and the noisy hum of traffic and people that it brings.  

“Two-thirds of my archive is now extinct,” says Stewart. “We think of dinosaurs and dodos and Irish Elks being extinct, but we don’t look at sound as something that can disappear. But you can’t replicate what I’ve done. You can’t drop a microphone in the Serengeti and get what I did 20 years ago, because now there’s a road going through it.”

In more ways than one, Stewart understands what it’s like to look extinction in the eye. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with cancer and given three to five years to live. These days he says he’s largely “bungee-corded to a hospital,” although when we speak, he’s in Louisiana on an expedition to make field recordings on the bayou. He’s planning to return to both Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands to record.  

“I’d like to go back to places to hear how much things have changed,” he says. “And I aim to. I’m living with cancer. I’m not dying with cancer.” 

Imperfect Cadence is only one component of Stewart’s significant contribution to natural history, recorded sound and people interested in both. Roughly a decade ago, he was offered “a huge amount of money for the archive” by a company that makes videogame consoles. “I asked them where the library was going to end up, and they said it would be in a basement somewhere,” he recalls. “That was just absolutely a definite no.” 

Instead, Stewart wants his prolific body of work to be used academically for students “who could benefit from the sounds” and by then be inspired to explore and protect nature. He foresees a portion of his catalog being donated to the British Library. “It has to be a voice for the natural world,” he says. 

In fact, it already is. Imperfect Cadence is included in the Sounds Right project, a cross-DSP initiative launched in April that’s made “Nature” an official artist, with songs that incorporate nature sounds collected on a “Feat. Nature” playlist that’s earning royalties for conservation projects. (In October, the initiative announced that in its first six months, it raised $225,000 for conversation projects in Colombia’s Tropical Andes, a region with one of the world’s highest rates of biodiversity and native species.) 

Robert Shields

Courtesy of Robert Shields

“It’s opened my eyes to the fact that there are incredible people working on sustainability, environmentalism, conservationism,” Shields says of being involved in Sounds Right. “When you get to dip your toe into a different world and see people who are committing so much time and energy to this stuff, it’s genuinely awe inspiring.” 

For the time being, Stewart and Shields plan to meet in Scotland next month to make live versions of some of the album songs in several of the places where Stewart made the original recordings years back. “I’m so looking forward to that,” says Stewart. “And if that’s the last breath in my body, I’ll die a happy man.” 

“We’ll have a whiskey and talk about the project,” says Shields.  

“Or two whiskeys,” suggests Stewart.